“Mordechai was definitely her pimp,” Avi Steinberg tells me of Esther. “The pimp is what makes it happen. People in the know know that Mordechai is making things move in that story.” Steinberg, 31, knows a lot about pimps. Or at least more than you’d expect an Orthodox-reared Harvard grad to know about them. But after spending two years working in Boston as a prison librarian, he is, if not an authority on the world’s oldest profession, an informed voice on the subject.

Yet what brought our conversation around to the Purim story was not the characters he met while working the checkout desk and then profiled in his memoir. Running the Books is about the two years he spent working at a Boston prison, an experience that helped him do what Harvard could not help him do: Grow up. In addition to recommending titles to inmates, Steinberg taught them creative writing, collected their “kites” (the notes they left for each other on the shelves and in the books), and became more entangled in their lives than an agent of the state probably should. But we had been talking about the other famous Esther—Petrack, of America’s Next Top Model.

“Mordechai was definitely her pimp,” Avi Steinberg tells me of Esther. “The pimp is what makes it happen. People in the know know that Mordechai is making things move in that story.” Steinberg, 31, knows a lot about pimps. Or at least more than you’d expect an Orthodox-reared Harvard grad to know about them. But after spending two years working in Boston as a prison librarian, he is, if not an authority on the world’s oldest profession, an informed voice on the subject.

Yet what brought our conversation around to the Purim story was not the characters he met while working the checkout desk and then profiled in his memoir. Running the Books is about the two years he spent working at a Boston prison, an experience that helped him do what Harvard could not help him do: Grow up. In addition to recommending titles to inmates, Steinberg taught them creative writing, collected their “kites” (the notes they left for each other on the shelves and in the books), and became more entangled in their lives than an agent of the state probably should. But we had been talking about the other famous Esther—Petrack, of America’s Next Top Model.